Okay. First things first. I’ve long ago come clean as a violence junkie. Maybe even a scholar. But, okay, okay, this is not about me. So, your new book, Pot Farm, deals with your experiences working on a medical marijuana farm in Northern California—the politics, the narratives, the social hierarchies and what-not. Your first day there, you mention some guy named Hector the Treetop Sniper or something. Is this some sort of metaphor (I really hope not, just to let you know) for the way violence rises, approaches the ether, spreads, and returns to us earthlings as, say, a “black rain” of sorts? Or are you talking about an actual sniper here? I mean, a dude with a gun.

Hector was an actual sniper, flesh and blood. Highly trained, but not bloodthirsty. A real sweetheart.

I would say: At dusk, the crops’ silhouettes held to the sky like herons cemented into the earth, leaves flapping feebly in the Northern California wind, unable to lift themselves from the forthcoming hands of the Morning Pickers, and the watchful green eyes of Lady Wanda—I would say that, but I was likely stoned. It’s just as likely, the crops didn’t look like herons at all, there was no wind, and it may not have even been dusk. It could have been morning. It could have been afternoon. Having worked on a medical marijuana farm, filling six notebooks with scribblings of varying degrees of sense, and engaging in the attendant and standard subcultural vices, I have made of myself an unreliable narrator.

I would say: At dusk, the crops’ silhouettes held to the sky like herons cemented into the earth, leaves flapping feebly in the Northern California wind, unable to lift themselves from the forthcoming hands of the Morning Pickers, and the watchful green eyes of Lady Wanda—I would say that, but I was likely stoned.It’s just as likely, the crops didn’t look like herons at all, there was no wind, and it may not have even been dusk.It could have been morning.It could have been afternoon.Having worked on a medical marijuana farm, filling six notebooks with scrbblings of varying degrees of sense, and engaging in the attendant and standard subcultural vices, I have made of myself an unreliable narrator.